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Collective Responsibility First published Mon Aug 8, 2005; substantive revision Mon Jun 14, 2010 The notion of collective responsibility, like that of personal responsibility and shared responsibility, refers to both the causal responsibility of moral agents for harm in the world and the blameworthiness that we ascribe to them for having caused such harm. Hence, it is, like its two more purely individualistic counterparts, almost always a notion of moral, rather than purely causal, responsibility. But, unlike its two more purely individualistic counterparts, it does not associate either causal responsibility or blameworthiness with discrete individuals or locate the source of moral responsibility in the free will of individual moral agents. Instead, it associates both causal responsibility and blameworthiness with groups and locates the source of moral responsibility in the collective actions taken by these groups understood as collectives. Since the notion of collective responsibility is part of what many contemporary philosophers refer to as group morality, it has undergone a great deal of scrutiny in recent years by methodological and normative individualists alike. Methodological individualists challenge the very possibility of associating moral agency with groups, as distinct from their individual members, and normative individualists argue that collective responsibility violates principles of both individual responsibility and fairness. Defenders of collective responsibility take their cue from both sets of critical arguments and set out to show that collective responsibility—as well as group intentions, collective action, and group blameworthiness—are coherent as constructs and can be ascribed to agents fairly in at least some, if not all, cases. While the vast majority of those now writing on collective responsibility in philosophical circles continue to debate the possibility of collective responsibility, a smaller group of scholars has in recent years placed two further—and very important—concerns at the center of our attention. The first has to do with whether groups have to meet the same stringent conditions of moral responsibility that individuals do. (Intentionality becomes key here.) The second has to do with the advantages and disadvantages of holding particular kinds of groups, e.g., nation states, races, and ethnic groups, morally responsible in practice. 1. Collective Responsibility: the Philosophical Controversies 2. Making Sense of Collective Responsibility: Actions, Intentions and Group Solidarity 3. Collective Responsibility and the Structure of Groups 4. Can Collective Responsibility Be Distributed? 5. Alternative Approaches to Collective Responsibility 6. Collective Responsibility and the Question of Consequences 7. Selected Readings on Collective Responsibility Bibliography Academic Tools Other Internet Resources Related Entries 1. Collective Responsibility: the Controversies While the notion of moral responsibility traditionally understood grounds moral blameworthiness in the wills of discrete individuals who freely cause harm, the notion of collective responsibility associates both causation and blameworthiness with groups and construes groups as moral agents in their own right. Hence, it does not fit easily into the prevailing philosophical literature on moral responsibility, which generally asks about the relationship between free will and determinism. Nor has it been readily accepted by those who are used to construing moral agency in purely individualistic terms. Indeed, the notion of collective responsibility has become the source of three major philosophical controversies over the years by virtue of its very nature as a group-based construct. The first of these controversies concerns whether or not collective responsibility makes sense as a form of moral responsibility. Not surprisingly, the primary focus of attention here has been with both the moral agency of groups in general and the possibility of group intentions in particular. How, participants in this controversy have asked, can we understand the notion of collective responsibility as a matter of moral—and not just causal—responsibility? Is it possible for groups, as distinct from their members, to cause harm in the sense required by moral responsibility? to act as collectives? to have intentions? Is it possible for groups, as distinct from their members, to be morally blameworthy for bringing about harm? to be guilty as moral agents? The second controversy, interestingly enough, is not really about the moral responsibility of groups at all, even though it is couched in the language of collective moral responsibility. Instead, it is about the moral responsibility of individuals who belong to groups that are themselves thought to be morally responsible for particular cases of harm. How, participants in this controversy have asked, can we distribute collective responsibility across individual members of such a group? Does it makes sense to distribute collective responsibility in general? Is it appropriate to hold individual group members morally responsible for harm that other group members caused? that the group itself caused? that the group as a whole failed to prevent? If so, under what conditions and with respect to what particular kinds of groups? Random collections of individuals? Interest-based groups? Corporate entities? The third controversy is primarily normative and concerns the value of ascribing collective responsibility in practice. In some cases, the concern is with the general practice of collective responsibility and its consequences for our ability to sustain the values of individualism, freedom, and justice. In other cases, the concern is with the ascriptions of collective responsibility in particular contexts, e.g., in the contexts of war tribunals, reparations for slavery, terrorism, and rape, and with whether such ascriptions are productive and/or fair to those being blamed. While those participating in these three controversies have focused their attention primarily on the formulation of collective responsibility as a concept rather than on the politics of ascribing collective responsibility, they have not made their arguments in a social and political vacuum. Nor have they ignored the various hard cases of collective responsibility that have racked the consciences of historical actors since WWII. Indeed, participants in all three controversies have placed a variety of such cases, ranging from the extermination of Jews during WWII to the atrocities of the Vietnam War to the racist treatment of American blacks, at the center of their attention in an effort to establish whether or not particular groups in history can legitimately be considered morally responsible for the suffering that group members have brought about through their faulty actions. 2. Making Sense of Collective Responsibility: Actions, Intentions, and Group Solidarity Almost all of those now writing about collective responsibility agree that collective responsibility would make sense if it were merely an aggregative phenomenon. But they disagree markedly about whether collective responsibility makes sense as a non-distributive phenomenon, i.e., as a phenomenon that transcends the contributions of particular group members. In this context, as in many others, skeptics set the agenda. Two claims become crucial. The first is that groups, unlike individuals, cannot form intentions and hence cannot be understood to act or to cause harm qua groups. The second is that groups, as distinct from their individual members, cannot be understood as morally blameworthy in the sense required by moral responsibility. Both claims come out of classical methodological individualism of the sort articulated by Max Weber (Weber 1914) and H. D. Lewis (Lewis 1948) in their respective rejections of collective responsibility. In Economy and Society Vol. I, Weber (Weber 1914) argues that collective responsibility makes no sense both because we cannot isolate genuinely collective actions, as distinct from identical actions of many persons, and because groups, unlike the individuals who belong to them, cannot think as groups or formulate intentions of the kind normally thought to be necessary to actions. H. D. Lewis follows suit in his own arguments and couples his methodological individualism with a sense of moral outrage at the idea of blaming individuals for the actions of others. Lewis writes: Value belongs to the individual and it is the individual who is the sole bearer of moral responsibility. No one is morally guilty except in relation to some conduct which he himself considered to be wrong … Collective responsibility is … barbarous. (Lewis 1948, pp. 3–6) Contemporary critics of collective responsibility do not generally go as far as Lewis does here in equating collective responsibility with barbarism. But they do generally share their predecessors' skepticism about the possibility of both group intentions and genuinely collective actions. (See below.) Likewise, they, too, worry about the fairness of ascribing collective responsibility to individuals who do not themselves directly cause harm or who do not bring about harm purposefully. Stephen Sverdlik writes: It would be unfair, whether we are considering a result produced by more than one person's action or by a single person, to blame a person for a result that he or she did not intend to produce. (Sverdlik 1987, p. 68) Both of these claims—that genuinely collective actions are not possible and that it would be unfair to consider agents morally blameworthy for harm that they did not bring about purposively—rest on two normative assumptions that are key to the critic's position. Both concern the importance of intentions. The first is that actions—whether they are individual or collective—necessarily begin with intentions. (Otherwise, they are not actions but instead kinds of behavior.) The second is that moral blameworthiness has its source in and requires the existence of bad intentions—or at least moral faultiness—on the part of those being held responsible. The first assumption, namely, that all actions begin with intentions, is very useful to critics because it enables them to write group intentions into the definition of collective action itself and hence render group intentions a necessary condition of collective responsibility. J. Angelo Corlett's definition of a collective action is typical here. According to Corlett, a collective (intentional) action is an action the subject of which is a collective intentional agent. A collective behavior is a doing or behavior that is the result of a collective, though not the result of its intentions. A collective action is caused by the beliefs and desires (wants) of the collective itself, whether or not such beliefs and desires can be accounted for or explained in individualistic terms (Corlett 2001, p. 575). The second assumption, namely, that moral blameworthiness of all kinds is grounded in the bad intentions of moral agents who cause harm, is also very useful to critics of collective responsibility, since it enables them to stipulate that collective responsibility requires, not just group intentions, but the ability of groups to have bad intentions or at least to be morally faulty. How, critics ask, can groups, as distinct from their individual members, be understood to have bad intentions? to be morally faulty? to have a moral character, faulty or not? How, in other words, can they be understood as appropriate bearers of moral blameworthiness, guilt, or shame? A majority of critics here concentrate on showing either that actions are associated exclusively with individuals, not groups, or that groups, which do not have minds of their own, cannot make choices or hold beliefs in the sense required by the formulation of intentions. H. D Lewis concentrates on making both points in his 1948 critique of collective responsibility. So, too, does J. W. N. Watkins (1957). Later methodological individualists such as Alvin Goldman (1970), Stephen Sverdlik (1987), J. Angelo Corlett (Corlett 2001), and Jan Narveson (2002), unlike their predecessors, are generally willing to acknowledge the sensibility of collective responsibility in a limited number of cases. But, they, too, draw attention to the host of difficulties that arise for collective responsibility as a moral construct once we acknowledge the simple fact that collectives do not have full blown mental lives. Critics of collective responsibility pay somewhat less attention to the nature of collective moral blameworthiness than they do to the nature of collective actions. But they do sometimes worry about the appropriateness of associating moral blameworthiness with groups, as distinct from group members. R. S. Downie, among others, places what turns out to be a very traditional notion of moral responsibility at the center of his attention and argues that collectives do not have moral faults, since they don't make moral choices, and hence they cannot properly be ascribed moral responsibility. … For there to be moral responsibility there must be blameworthiness involving a morally faulty decision, and this can only occur at the individual level (Downie 1969, p. 67). Jan Narveson goes as far in this context as to argue that the bearers of moral blameworthiness have to be individuals because only individuals can have moral agency. “Nothing else,” Narveson writes, “can literally be the bearer of full responsibility” (Narveson 2002, p. 179). The word “literally” here turns out to be significant for those writing on collective responsibility. For, it contrasts with the sense shared by Narveson and others that we might in the end be able to make sense of collective responsibility in metaphorical terms by treating individual moral agency, including both agent causation and moral blameworthiness, as a metaphor for group agency of the sort relevant to moral responsibility traditionally understood. Defenders of collective responsibility rely on a variety of philosophical strategies to debunk the above claims and to justify both the possibility of collective responsibility in some, if not all, cases, and the coherence of collective responsibility as an intellectual construct. One of these strategies has been simply to point out both that we blame groups all the time in practice and that we do so in a way that is difficult to analyze with the precepts of methodological individualism. David Cooper, among others, uses this strategy to great effect in his own defense of collective responsibility. According to Cooper, “there is an obvious point to be recognized and that obvious point is that responsibility is ascribed to collectives, as well as to individual persons. Blaming attitudes are held towards collective as well as towards individuals,” (Cooper 1968, p. 258.) Deborah Tollefsen (Tollefsen, 2006) goes as far as to argue that the sheer fact that we have emotional responses to groups—anger, resentment, an moral indignation—justifies our practice of holding groups morally responsible. So, too, does the sheer fact that we have feelings of pride, guilt, and shame as group members. (Whether or not the groups themselves can have these emotions remains up in the air.) Cooper and others acknowledge that both our use of language here and our blaming attitudes may be misguided. Hence, they find it necessary to show, not just that we ascribe blame to collectives in practice, but that the collective blame that we ascribe cannot be analyzed in terms of individual blame. Cooper himself takes on this project by exploring particular cases of blame, e.g., those associated with sports clubs and nations, that, he argues, can only attach to groups. According to Cooper, when we look at how such collectives act, we see that whether we regard statements about collectives as propositional functions or not, we cannot deduce from them statements about particular individuals. “This is so,” he argues, “because the existence of a collective is compatible with varying membership. No determinate set of individuals is necessary for the existence of the collective” (Cooper 1968, p. 260). In a similar vein, Peter French focuses on that class of predicates that, he contends, can only be true of collectives. According to French, there is a class of predicates that just cannot be true of individuals, that can only be true of collectives. Examples of such predicates abound … and include ‘disbanded’ (most uses of), ‘lost the football game’, ‘elected a president’, and ‘passed an amendment’. … Methodological individualism would be at a loss in this context. (French 1998, p. 37) A majority of those who defend the possibility of group actions in this context rely on linguistic analyses. But there are also those who, like Larry May, turn instead to social theory and to the existentialist tradition. May himself uses the relational theory of Jean-Paul Sartre to argue that groups can legitimately be ascribed actions in cases where individuals are related to one another and act in ways together that would not be possible if they acted alone. May sets down two relationally-based conditions under which we can legitimately say of an action that it is collective rather than individual—which for May means, not trans-individual, but relational. The first condition is that the individuals in question be related to each other so as to enable each to act in ways that they could not manage on their own. The second is that some individuals be authorized to represent their own actions as the actions of the group as a whole (May 1987, p. 55). What about group intentions? Not surprisingly, group intentions present an even greater challenge than group actions do. For, intentions are mental states and hence not the kinds of things that are normally thought to be shareable. Are they sharable? According to Brook Sadler and others, the question is inherently puzzling. For, “if intentions are mental states, states which play a fundamental role in an agent's practical deliberation and volition, the prospect of a shared intention introduces the specter of shared mental states and hence shared minds”—which is something that philosophers have traditionally hoped to leave behind. (Sadler 2006, p.115.) Indeed, the possibility that collective responsibility requires, not only collective actions and intentions, but a collective mind, has proven to be one of the greatest challenges to those who want to sustain a notion of collective responsibility. Groups can legitimately be said to have beliefs and other states characteristic of a mind in particular cases, e.g., when the group is organized around such beliefs. But groups do not seem to have minds in any sense other than their ability to build on the minds of individual members. As David Sosa argues, “groups might be said to have a mind or a will but only in a derivative sense: the persons that are members of the group have minds, and the group's mind (in whatever sense it has one, its beliefs and desires) is some sort of construct from those minds” (Sosa 2007, p. 215). How, then, if at all, can defenders of collective responsibility render the notion of shared intentions comprehensible? Interestingly enough, defenders of collective responsibility frequently turn back here to the works of Durkheim (1895) and Simmel (1971), as well as to that of Sartre (1960), for inspiration, although they themselves proceed analytically. Margaret Gilbert, who grounds several of her arguments in Durkheim's theory of social facts, develops what she calls a “plural-subject account” of shared intentions to justify the coherence of collective responsibility (Gilbert 1989, 2000, and 2006). She does so in large part, like Michael Bratman (1992, 1993, and 2006) and others do, by zeroing in on joint commitments. According to Gilbert, group intentions exist when two or more persons constitute the plural subject of an intention to carry out a particular action, or, in other words, when “they are jointly committed to intending as a body to do A” (Gilbert, 2000, p. 22). David Velleman goes on to stress the unified nature of this plural subject. A “truly plural subject”, he writes, involves “two or more subjects who combine in such a way as to make one subject” (Velleman 1997). Raimo Tuomela (1989, 2005, and 2006) chooses a somewhat different strategy in his defense of collective responsibility. He puts forward what he calls “we intentions.” Like Gilbert, he constructs a collective subject on the basis of joint commitments and then applies it to the notion of collective responsibility. But he does not, like Gilbert, stress the pluralistic nature of this subject. Instead, he argues that collective intentional agency supervenes on individual intentional agency in ways that allow us to talk about both collective intentions and collective actions. According to Tuomela, actions by collectives supervene on the actions of the operative members of the collective in such a way that the properties of particular collectives, such their intentions, beliefs, and desires, are “embodied in” and “determined by” the perspectives of the properties of individual members or representatives of the collective in question (Tuomela 1989, p. 494). Interestingly enough, Tuomela's attempt here to save collective responsibility by positing such a representative subject recalls the efforts of Thomas Hobbes to create a collective subject in the guise of his Leviathan (1651). Hobbes, in an effort both to explain sovereignty in general and to justify the legitimacy of the English monarchy in particular, posited a higher authority in the community—the Leviathan—whose own will, as well as actions, came to be those of its/his subjects as a result of their having transferred their own agency to it/him as part of the only kind of social contract that from Hobbes's perspective made collective life possible. Hobbes's collective subject not only represented group members but captured their very being as members of his Leviathan. Contemporary defenders of collective responsibility sometimes recall Hobbes's Leviathan in their own attempt to develop a collective subject (see for example: Copp 1980). But they do not, in light of Hobbes's own authoritarianism, go as far as to accept Hobbes's argument that a Leviathan is necessary to capture the collective will. Nor do they generally toy with the possibility of reintroducing the seemingly more benevolent general will of Rousseau (1762) as a way of substantiating group intentions. Instead, they look for an alternative, less authoritarian, way of substantiating group intentions—representational or not—or else argue that group intentions of the sort associated with traditional Kantian notions of moral agency are not after all necessary to collective moral responsibility. Larry May offers one of the most interesting arguments of the latter sort in his own defense of collective moral agency (May 1987 and 2006). May rejects many of the above accounts of group intentions as too closely tied to Kantian notions of moral agency. But he does not do away with group intentions as a necessary condition of collective responsibility. Nor does he accept a fully collectivist methodology. Instead, he reformulates group intentions within a theory of what he calls interdependence and, in doing so, develops a general outlook on collective responsibility that not only combines individualism and collectivism but places both relationships and social structures at the center of our attention. The challenge here becomes to describe what such group intentions actually look like. May relies in this context once again on the work of Sartre to develop his account of group intentions and posits what he calls a “pre-reflective intention”, i.e., “an intention which is not yet reflected upon by each of the members of the group” (May 1987 p. 64). May makes clear here that group intentions of this sort arise out of the relationships between particular members of a group rather than from any one group member. Hence, while they are not trans-individual or collective in any sense that stands totally above individuals, they can be treated “as if they are collective” (May 1987, p. 64) Moreover, these intentions are, May makes clear, not individual intentions but group-based. “Since each member of the group comes to have the same intention, either reflectively or pre-reflectively”, it is “different from their individual intentions.” Indeed, “the sameness of intention is collective in the sense that it is caused by the group structure, that is, it is group-based” (May 1987, p. 65).